TrustSphere
 

The EU's payments package, a third Payment Services Directive alongside a directly applicable Payment Services Regulation, reached [provisional...

Since 7 May 2026, every authorised payment institution and e-money firm in the UK has been living under the FCA's Supplementary Regime for...

The Consumer Duty is now three years old as a rulebook and has quietly become something financial crime teams cannot treat as somebody else's...

For most of its life, the UK's digital identity certification scheme has been something banks watched rather than acted on: a well-intentioned...

The most expensive mistake in financial crime vendor selection happens after the RFP closes. A shortlist of three to five vendors is selected, each...

The Economic Crime (Anti-Money Laundering) Levy has quietly become a much bigger bill for the largest AML-regulated entities, and TrustSphere's view...

The FATF's fifth round of mutual evaluations is often described as a methodology refresh. TrustSphere's view is that this undersells it badly: the...

A great deal of vendor commentary over the past year has told financial crime teams that their AML and fraud detection systems will become "high-risk...

The Wolfsberg Group's 2026 refresh of its core principles signals the most substantive evolution in correspondent banking guidance in several years. The update consolidates lessons from recent enforcement actions, recognises the operational reality of cross-border payment modernisation, and pushes member banks toward more risk-sensitive, data-driven due diligence. The implications extend well beyond the thirteen Wolfsberg members. Because non-member banks typically adopt Wolf

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has now been in force long enough to assess its real-world impact. The reforms to Companies House, the failure-to-prevent fraud offence, and the expanded identity verification requirements represented the UK's most ambitious anti-economic-crime reform package in decades. Two years on, the picture is mixed. Transparency has improved in measurable ways. Enforcement capacity has expanded. But structural weaknesses in verification

Banking-as-a-Service has transformed how fintechs, retailers, and gig-economy platforms deliver financial products. The model has also exposed a recurring structural weakness. The sponsor bank holds the licence and the regulatory accountability, while the customer experience, onboarding decisions and monitoring rules sit largely with the platform partner. When fraud or money laundering controls fail in this model, the consequences land squarely with the bank. Recent enforceme

The first half of 2026 has produced some of the largest sanctions enforcement actions on record. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have moved decisively against institutions whose screening controls failed to keep pace with the rapid expansion of sanctions perimeters since 2022. The pattern of failure is remarkably consistent. It is rarely the absence of a screening tool that drives enforcement. It is almost always the quality of the data feeding that tool, the calibra

Hong Kong's Stablecoin Ordinance has moved the territory from permissive experimentation to one of the world's most detailed regulatory regimes for fiat-referenced stablecoin issuance. The HKMA now licenses issuers, sets reserve and redemption standards, and imposes direct financial crime obligations on a new class of regulated entity. For global banks, payment providers and fintechs with Asia-Pacific operations, the ordinance is not merely a local compliance exercise. It cre